The Media Project is a network of mainstream journalists who are Christians pursuing accurate and intellectually honest reporting on all aspects of culture, particularly the role of religion in public life in all corners of the world. It welcomes friends from other faiths to such discussions and training.

According to widely reported rumors based on largely anonymous
sources close to the presiding authorities, this Mediterranean
neighborhood once attracted a notable visitor. Arriving discreetly in a
small Palestinian town, He attracted attention by his knowledge of a
transcendent order and by his miraculous cures. Some eloquent witnesses
called the visitor “God,” or the “Son of God,” though some two thousand
years later what they meant remains in dispute.

In any case, He and his followers established a hierarchical
religion and an apostolic priesthood. Said to be the Creator of the
Cosmos, He was the source of all truth and moral authority. Kings and
scholars bowed before Him. Nearly all of the Great Men of science and
history, from Pascal to Einstein, sought to interpret His laws and
creative powers, which were alleged to be manifest both in nature and
in scripture.

Now, as the result of some epistemic plague, He is alleged to have
died. Amid the throes of the Death of God, humans claim new rights and
ordain new laws of pleasure and progress. Without God, everything is
permitted. Priests remove their clothes in public and molest children
on the Internet. At the Harvard Divinity School professors erect
crosses and crèches made entirely of condoms. Theology succumbs to
hedonism. In some contemporary accounts, God came out of the closet,
ordained homosexual marriage, caroused at various World Councils and
Conventions of Churches, and eventually died of AIDS.

In God’s majestic stead has emerged a bottom-up regime of Darwinian
materialism as the sole scientifically tenable explanation for human
life and natural diversity. The new regime essentially flattens the
Universe. Replacing the story of creation—the rumored God and
hierarchical cosmos—is an ebullition of accidental and purely physical
fact. All reality is said to be derivable from such physically
ascertainable and testable facts.

“Just the facts, Mam!” So can be summed up the new flat cosmos. I
remember that canonical phrase from my childhood. I heard it as I
clutched my new transistor radio—the dazzling new technology of my
youth—to hear tales of tough interrogation by a no-nonsense detective
named Jack Webb on a program called Dragnet. Or was it Joseph Welch at
the Army McCarthy hearings before the US Senate? Through the fogs of
time, the voices all converge but the message remains: “Just the
facts.”

In my memory, the program on the radio segued into black and white
television stories of Earle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason, the sage and
upright defense lawyer, also insisting on the primacy of facts. Finally
came Sergeant Colombo (or was it Walter Cronkite?) upholding the same
moral universe of physical factuality, with all other hierarchical
forms of power or claims of authority banished to the lapsarian
fringes. There, Watergate burglars, oilmen, and rogue CIA officials
conspired in the night for Woodward and Bernstein to expose in the
pages of the Washington Post.

Representing the netherworld of non-facts were hypocritical
preachers and prevaricating conservative politicians, babbling crones
and prattling codgers. These were often humorous figures who insisted
on trafficking in the inferior coin of “rumor” and “hearsay,”
revelation or scripture. But not everyone laughed. People who upheld a
top-down order of monotheistic creation faced charges of conspiracy and
mendacity. They were liars in high places speaking an illegitimate
jargon of patriarchal or capitalist power summed up as “sexism, racism,
and homophobia”—all eminently culpable and non-factual forms of
priestcraft.

“Just the facts, Mam,” was the theory of knowledge that brought me
into journalism. I will call it the epistemedia of my youth: the
explicit and implicit theory of journalistic and scientific knowledge
that I was taught at Harvard. The epistemedia reached its pinnacle in
the classes of logical positivist philosophers, who developed an
elaborate technique for debunking all claims of transcendent or even
abstract truth. If it was not testable material fact, it was
meaningless mysticism. All other claims of truth trailed far behind
material factuality in a long tail of the impressionistic or deceitful,
bogus or biased, tendentious or sanctimonious, hypocritical or hyped,
self-interested or self-indulgent.

However prestigious this approach remains among most journalists
today, to me that assurance of the impregnable authority of “fact”
seems long gone. I am here to tell you that there has occurred an
epistemic inversion, in which the role of facts and rumors has subtly
but entirely changed. I might sum up the inversion by saying that facts
have become religious and rumors have become scientific.

In the course of a half century, that transistor at the heart of he
handheld radio of my youth has multiplied by the millions of trillions
and turned into the Internet. At the heart of the net is “Google.”
Google has evolved from a mere noun into a verb. “Google” the word
“fact”—especially the phrase “scientific fact”—and you can discover
some of the most popular scientific facts of the epoch. Devotedly
cataloged by Google, these are the “facts” most avidly upheld by the
media, who have largely usurped from priests and scientists the role of
certifying the realms of public truth.

Near the very pinnacle of scientific factuality, you will find a
“human-caused” (or more specifically capitalist-caused) catastrophe
called global warming or climate change.

There is no evidence at all for this proposition. The climate is
always changing. By all the available long-term data series, such as
ice cores and the Sargasso Sea residues, confirmed by historical
accounts, temperatures are currently a little colder than the average
of the last 3000 years. It is warmer than the little ice age of the
1700s but around two degrees C colder than the Medieval Climate Optimum
around the turn of the millennium and other well documented warm
periods at 500 and 1000 BC.

But this empirical and historical record does not interest the
global warmers. They assert the fact of human caused global warming on
the basis of authority. Cited is an alleged “consensus of scientists.”
Since most actual scientists do not agree with the alleged consensus
(some 18 thousand of them signed a protest against it), the heretics
must be defrocked. These actual scientists are depicted as gullible or
vendible tools of a sinister conspiracy of oil executives at Exxon
Mobil or Halliburton, led by a diabolical horned figure—an all powerful
but possibly mythical beast—named Dick Cheney. The man behind the
petition of 18 thousand scientists is Arthur Robinson, the Caltech
protégé of double Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling. Under the title Access
to
Energy, Robinson writes a monthly newsletter critique of spurious scientific “facts”.

A related “fact,” celebrated by the media, concerns the alleged
depletion of reserves of fossil fuel. As a practical matter, available
reserves are determined by technology. New technologies for extracting
oil from tar sands and shale render petroleum more abundant than ever
before in history. But if you don’t like these sources, coal and
natural gas are ubiquitous and can be readily converted into usable
energy liquids.

The global warming fabric of “fact,” however, condemns fossil fuels
and thus opposes their continued extraction. The false “fact” of human
caused climate change thus requires a complementary pseudo-fact of CO2
pollution and a further false fact of the exhaustion of fossil fuels.

Uranium, of course, remains abundant, but the media treats this form
of energy as dangerous, confusing power plants with bombs and
perpetuating the myth of widespread death and damage from the Soviet
nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. An elaborate government study reported
recently that no one outside the immediate area died as a result of the
Chernobyl incident.

The inversion of what I would call facticity (to differentiate it
from real factuality) began perhaps five decades ago when the media
similarly reported the “fact” of devastating environmental damage from
DDT. As has been rediscovered in recent times, DDT is by far the most
benign from of pesticide and its use succeeded in largely eliminating
the scourge of malaria, saving hundreds of millions of lives and
winning a well-deserved Nobel Prize for its inventor. Even the
scientific review board of the US Environmental Protection Agency that
launched the DDT ban found DDT to be entirely safe and environmentally
beneficial.

But by then, on matters of facticity, the Media was sufficiently
powerful to overrule the regnant scientists and politicians. Rachel
Carson, a media heroine, wrote Silent Spring and declared the human
toxicity of DDT a fact. The rest of the media and political allies such
as the then young Al Gore ratified the media vote. DDT was largely
banned. Malaria returned and hundreds of millions of human beings,
mostly children in the Third World, died on the altar of this new fact.

A further fact lucratively popular is the deadly toxicity of
asbestos. Most asbestos is harmless and has the extremely beneficial
property of retarding fires, which have been known to inflict
environmental damage and cause pain to animals. However, the regnant
authorities condemned the substance as carcinogenic and it was duly
banned (though only five percent of asbestos actually could cause the
deadly disease and then only if it were inhaled for long periods). As a
result of the ban and subsequent class action litigation, the US
chemical industry, including 35 major corporations, was largely
bankrupted with total costs mounting over a trillion dollars.

The asbestos ban brought other less recognized costs. In the course
of the construction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New
York, the use of asbestos was halted. As a result, asbestos insulation
was replaced with inferior materials above the 38th floor of the first
WTC tower and throughout all. of the second Tower. At the time, the
engineer in charge declared that the building would fall in a fire. His
warnings were ignored by the WTC construction manager Rino Monti who
was persuaded by an environmentalist campaign to fear an emanation of
asbestos fiber more than the eruption of fire at hundreds of meters
above the ground. As a direct result of this decision, 2000 people
died. As an indirect result of this disaster of false facticity, the US
dispatched troops to the Middle East.

In the last decades of the Twentieth Century, the nimbus of
facticity spread to human biology and ordained the non-existence of
significant biological differences between the brains of men and women.
All variations in mathematical test scores or in pay or precedence were
ascribed to a pervasive conspiratorial force called patriarchy, which
also came to have something to do with Dick Cheney or his wife Lynne.
Heretical skeptics such as Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, and
myself, were pilloried in the media.

Other “facts” beloved of the media concern the matter of public
opinion—what views are held by the public on a variety of subjects at
any particular time. Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion refuted such
facts, I would think for all time; he showed that the “public” is
largely a phantom and that this phantom public cannot be relevantly
said to hold detailed opinions on anything much. The key input in any
public opinion poll is the choice of questions and the way they are
framed by the media. The outputs of public opinion are largely
determined by these media inputs.

Much of the content of the media consists in reportage and analysis
of public opinion polls conducted by other parts of the media—phantoms
chasing phantoms in a world of funhouse mirrors. Most of the polls of
scientists that allege a “consensus” on this or that “fact” are similar
reflections of such shadows in mirrors in a platonic cave.

The great 20th century Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset,
writing in his masterpiece The Revolt of the Masses, explained this
state of affairs as an invasion of modern society by “barbarians of
specialization.” Each specialist knows virtually nothing about
neighboring disciplines. But on the basis of his authority in his
chosen field he confidently opines on subjects of which he is mostly
ignorant. He readily joins polled consensuses of established beliefs
not because he knows they are true but because in a relativistic world
he has a strong interest in gaining reciprocal respect from his peers.

I could go through scores of spurious facts enshrined by the media
as “scientific truths.” In sum, they epitomize the inversion that I am
describing. The word “fact” has come to mean a fervently held belief
that is not true—a tenet or dogma presented to be beyond refutation. It
is validated only by the authority of consensus or scripture. In other
words, a fact has become a religious tenet in disguise.

The prevailing secular religion is widely called “environmental
science.” It has the same relation to science as does so-called
“Christian Science”. As physicist Richard Feynman once observed about
adjectival sciences: “If a science has an adjective it probably isn’t.”
Environmental science is mainly an anti-capitalist religion like
Marxism. Global warming is its myth of hellfire. Rachel Carson was its
first prophet in America. Al Gore is its current Jeremiah. Politicians
around the globe see it as a shining path to power—a way to submit all
economic growth to political regulation by controlling the use of the
critical energy resources that sustain capitalist industry and human
prosperity. But at the foundation of this ideology of control is the
control of ideological “facts.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, a similar inversion can be
said to have affected the concept of “rumor.” Unlike “facts,” which are
deemed irrefutable, rumors are reports for which truth claims are
always tentative and falsifiable. You do not believe a rumor simply
because Al Gore or Rachel Carson or Noam Chomsky says it is true. A
rumor has become a form of belief that is more scientific than facts
are.

The ultimate source of this new inversion of fact and rumor is Karl
Popper. Popper declared that the defining characteristic of a
scientific proposition is falsifiability; it can be refuted and must be
revised in the face of new evidence.

By the Popperian standard, for example, the notion of “the survival
of the fittest” is not a scientific proposition but a largely empty
tautology. What is fit survives. What survives is fit. It is a circular
affirmation of no particular content—a self-referential truism that
tells nothing significant about the world.

In a Popperian world, a consensus of scientists is an entirely
irrelevant source of authority for any particular claim of truth. Truth
is defined by the willingness of the truth tellers to forgo consensual
applause and submit their beliefs to empirical test. Rumors are far
more scientific than “facts” are because rumors don’t make claims of
irrefutable truth that stifle further research.

Let me close by reporting some rumors from the world of technology.
I have spent most of the last 30 years studying, describing, and
finally financing various forms of the transistor and optical
technologies behind the Internet. In a book called Life After
Television, published in 1990 and again in 1994, I predicted that the
coming “worldwide web of glass and light” would doom television and
usher in a Golden Age of text. TV was already fine for images, I wrote.
Therefore the ongoing improvement of screens would chiefly favor text.
I said that in digital form newspapers would dominate the new epoch.

Today emails, nearly all text, are the dominant form of
communication, emitted at a rate of millions per second. To measure
email output, you have to use physical measures of frequency normally
applied to electromagnetic radiation—millions per second or megahertz.
Beyond emails, there are today some five million regularly published
blogs, also mostly text. And although many newspaper companies are
struggling, newspaper content is more widely distributed than ever
before in history. By the measure of hypertext referrals, five out of
the ten most influential websites are run by newspaper or magazine
companies. The New York Times, amazingly, remains number one.

With regard to the prevailing materialist claims of a flat universe,
the key characteristic of the information technology behind the
Internet is that it is top-down and hierarchical, not bottom up and
accidental. Flat universe materialism has become a prevailing
materialist superstition.

Take a computer, the epitome of information technology. You can know
the location and condition of every atom or molecule in a computer
microchip without having any information at all about what function the
computer is performing or what content it is processing. The physical
layer of the computer reveals virtually nothing about the seven layers
of abstraction above it. To know what the computer is doing entails
knowing the source code of the software program that the machine is
executing. That source code originated in a human brain.

Analogously knowledge of the transactions among the tens of
trillions of neurons in the human brain reveals no more about the
content of human thought than does knowledge of a computer’s molecular
structure reveal about its content or function. As computer titans
Gregory Chaitin, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing have shown, software
programs ultimately stem from mathematical logic. In the primary
mathematical discovery of the Twentieth Century, Kurt Godel proved in
essence that mathematical systems—and thus all logical schemes—are
incomplete in themselves. They are dependent on premises beyond
themselves and irreducible to their own logic.

The human mind is similarly irreducible to its physical facts.
Physicist and Nobel laureate biologist Max Delbruck made this point
through a provocative analogy with a famous German fictional character.
He said that the campaign by neuroscientists to reduce the human mind
to purely physical causes reminded him of nothing so much as “the
effort of Baron Munchausen to extract himself from a swamp by pulling
ever harder on his own hair.”

Mind is not reducible to physical brain and the brain is not
reducible to the movements of its atoms and molecules. Like the
structure of information technology, the Universe is not flat. It is
hierarchical and at the top remains the authority of the word—the logic
of the ultimate. Throughout human history, it has been economical and
convenient to call this ultimate source of truth and creation God. All
monotheistic religions uphold the concept.

A monotheistic God is mere rumor. It can be refuted by showing many
parallel realities ruled by different Gods. So far, no other parallel
universes have been found, though scientists persist in seeking them.
Such claims remain in the realm of rumor.

For irrefutable facts you must consult Al Gore, the United Nations,
and their various commissions of truth and politics trying to close
down inconvenient arguments about the facticity of the environmental
panic of the day.

In a Popperian world, rumor is superior to fact. However, the realm
of rumor requires careful maintenance of its sustaining connection with
the exacting Popperian regimen of science. As philosopher Andrew Cort
has written in his essay The American Psyche in Search of a Soul,
“Without this connection [to scientific rigor] mind becomes puerile,
the emotions become sentimental, the individual becomes ineffectual (or
worse, lunatic and dangerous), and culture become stagnant (or fanatic
and depraved).”

The crisis of Western thought arises from this displacement at the
heart of the American media and academia, where facts have declined
into a mere chaos of physical claims.

At the same time, as Cort writes, “The realm of science, which
broadly includes the entire visible external life of nature, and by
extension, the life of action, politics, economics and technology,
requires a connection with the realm of spirit, the heart, the
philosophic mind. Otherwise, science becomes merely the accumulation of
data devoid of meaning—a trivial and dangerous pursuit, which
inescapably leads to apathy, cruelty [and yes] the destruction of the
environment, an insipid consumerism, and all the inner emptiness which
rots and impoverishes our lives and society….

Cort concludes: “The spirit needs material science, to become mature
and useful. Science needs the spirit, to become decent and intelligent.
Only the soul can unite them.”

So at the top of the hierarchy remains the human soul, in
correspondence with the monotheist order—the divine. This may be rumor,
but it is also fact. It cannot be refuted by a flat-universe society of
materialist superstitions. Only in the fusion of soul and science in
hierarchical aspiration and faith can be found the source of truth in
the modern world.